🙃 30 days of Wim Hof

I don’t believe in miracles. And I don’t know anything about all the claims and science behind Wim Hofs method. All I can say is that it is working for what I’m looking for.

In a busy family life with a new baby arrived in May and a busy entrepreneurial work life I have felt close to burned out many times in the past year. Really low energy, low motivation despite exciting projects to work on, low inspiration, just tired all the time, angry and annoyed far too often. And I’ve been trying many things from stoicism to meditation and all of these things still help a bit (and I meditate for a whole other reason than the above issues). But after 1 month on Wim Hof I feel really different.

I feel a mental energy that I haven’t felt in years, I feel inspired again which, for somebody that just throw myself at everything I find interesting can be a bit of a hazard and I feel so motivated that I now struggle going to bed (hence this blogpost at 1:30am 😅).

I remember wondering in my early 30s whether that energy that I felt in my 20s would ever come back. But now it has!

The mental energy is a total game changer. I find myself not getting as angry or in general bad mood anymore simply because stuff don’t hit me as hard as it used to.

But all this is very feely things and hard to quantify. So how about the fact that over the past 30 days I’ve done more than 750 push-ups lately averaging 35 and above and all done without breathing 😶. Before I could do maybe 7-8 and haven’t done any in since my last gym class in high school. I recently extended my maximum run time without breaks from 20 mins to 1h15mins. Also just today I beat my breath holding record by being able to hold my breath for 2m15s. Finally, my sleeping heart rate have gone down from 70 to 60-ish and my daily heart rate have seen a similar drop.

I really don’t want to peddle some weird shit but this really works!

So what have I done. The routine is so simple that it must be almost impossible that it’s some kind of placebo effect because I really don’t believe this stuff should work.

🥶Cold shower: Do a hot shower as usual and then finish with a cold one. Gradually extending each day the length you stay in from 5 seconds to more than 2mins.
🌬️Breathing: You do these breathing rounds where you basically do a mild form of hyperventilating before holding your breath with empty lungs and measure the time. This you also gradually build up from 1 round to 4 rounds over a week.
💪Push-ups: Do 1 round of breathing and then do as many push-ups as possible without breathing.

What’s really interesting about the cold showers is that initially you have to really control your shivering by controlling your breathing. Taking long slow breaths to stop the shivering. But when you pass 1 min all that goes away. The water suddenly hardly feels cold. This could be compared to going into a cold swimming pool. After a while you’ll get used to it but no because the next time you do the cold shower you don’t shiver. You don’t have to control anything with your breathing. You just feel the cold and decide not to shiver 🤯. That’s what it feels like.

Anyway that’s it. Google Wim Hof method or Iceman as he’s also known and you’ll find an instructional videos. I’m totally blown away by the effect this has had on me in just one month.

Will definitely do a follow up post in the future.